Monday, January 16, 2012

Translations in #SVG

Scalable Vector Graphics provide wonderful crisp illustrations that look smart in any size. Texts can be included in such graphics for instance to point to a named detail. When text is included, it scales with the image.

It is possible to include texts in multiple languages in a SVG image. For us the trick is to make these translations available in MediaWiki.

After a first stab at translations for SVG at the Toolserver, Harry Burt (User:Jarry1250) has gone one better and started writing an extension that will allow for the translation of SVG texts at Commons. To do this, Harry needed access to the Wikimedia source repository. He did get access and has written a prototype extension. He submitted a patch that allows the same SVG to be rendered in different languages, but it may take time for that to become part of MediaWiki core.